Great news! A good Samaritan, whose handle is “creiercret,” recently uploaded the free, Creative Commons-licensed PDF of The Late Age of Print onto the document sharing site, Scribd. Here’s the link to the PDF if you’re interested in checking it out. The book has already had more than 100 views on the site, I’m pleased to report.
Late Age has been accessible for free online for almost a year, so why am I so excited to see it appear now on Scribd? Mainly because the site just added new sharing features, making it easy to send content to iPhones, Nooks, Kindles, and just about every other major e-reader you can imagine. In other words, The Late Age of Print’s mobility-quotient just increased significantly.
I mayhave some more exciting, mobility-related news about the book, which hopefully I’ll be able to share with you in the next week or so. I’ll keep you posted. Until then, be sure to check out The Late Age of Print on Scribd, and why don’t you go ahead shoot a copy off to your favorite e-reader while you’re at it!?
On Wednesday of last week, Apple made the long-anticipated announcement about its new tablet computer, the iPad. Ever since then the media sphere has been abuzz with debate about the virtues and vices of the device.
As an avid iPod Touch user, I’ll admit to being rather intrigued by the iPad, despite the concerns many already have expressed about the latter’s lack of tinker-ability. I don’t want to dwell on that here, however. Instead, I want to focus on what Apple’s full-blown foray into the world of ebooks, via the iPad’s integration with the company’s new iBooks store, might portend for the future of books and reading.
Back in 2003 I published a piece in a fabulous online cultural studies journal called Culture Machine. (It’s edited by Professor Gary Hall of Coventry University, about whose Digitize This Book![University of MN Press, 2008] I cannot say enough positive things.) The essay was called “Book 2.0,” and it was a revised excerpt from the first chapter of my doctoral dissertation. In my book The Late Age of Print, I explore how ebooks have emerged in response to concerns about the ease with which printed books can circulate. “Book 2.0″ complements the narrative from Late Age. It explores how a persistent frustration with the material weightiness of printed books helped lead to the development of a variety of alternative book — eventually ebook — technologies over the course of several centuries.
When I was composing “Book 2.0,” there was, much like today, extraordinary optimism about the immediate prospects for ebooks. It was the heady days of the late 1990s/early 2000s, right before the dotcom bubble burst. At the time many people were claiming that we were in the midst of an ebook revolution. They pointed to a host of new devices — Rocket eBooks, SoftBooks, Everybooks, and more — as evidence of the upheaval. This was it: the moment when ebooks — finally, really — would stick.
Where are all of those “revolutionary” e-readers today? They’re nowhere to be found, except maybe in the odd collector’s corner over on eBay. Surely there are many reasons for their failure to launch, among them the economic downturn of the early 2000s. They were also pretty rudimentary, technologically speaking. But another reason for the lack of uptake, I’d contend, was the rampant proliferation of devices that happened to occur within a short period of time. Why would consumers want to trust making the leap into e-reading when they could not be sure of which reader or proprietary format would win out?
What the ebook mania of the early 2000s teaches us is that consumers get skittish when companies refuse to cooperate on interoperability and to engineer their devices accordingly. Rather than buying an e-reader and possibly getting burned down the road, book lovers want to see which one will win out in the end. Only the end never comes. Too many e-readers results a situation in which, rather than one or two rising to the top, they all just end up cannibalizing one another.
Life was relatively simple back in late 2007/early 2008, when the Amazon Kindle and Sony Reader were pretty much the only kids on the ebook block. But today, again, we see a bunch of new ebook devices emerging on the scene — from the Barnes & Noble Nook to the Apple iPad, Alauratek Libre, Plastic Logic Que, Cybook Opus, and more. Now, I’m all for healthy competition in the ebook market. (Apple’s venture, for example, has pushed Amazon to improve its Kindle royalty structure.) Then again, if recent history teaches us anything, then it teaches us that these and other ebook developers need to figure out how to work together if indeed they really want e-reading to make it in the long term.
By the looks of things, 2009 is shaping up to be theyear for giving the gift of books…e-books, that is.
Take the Amazon Kindle, for instance. Amazon.com is touting the device on its homepage as its “#1 bestselling, #1 most wished for, and #1 most gifted [is that really a verb?] product.” Sales surely have been helped along by the catchy little advertisement for Kindle embedded above, which has been appearing regularly on TV stations throughout the United States since November. You may not know this, but the commercial is the result of a contest that Amazon sponsored last summer, asking customers to produce their own 30-second spots showcasing the e-reader.
Over at the other end of the post-Gutenberg galaxy, meanwhile, Barnes & Noble has already exhausted its supply of Nooks. Don’t despair, though. In lieu of an actual Nook, the bookseller is more than happy to ship a holiday-themed certificate to you and yours explaining that the “hottest gift of the season may be sold out, but with our elegant Nook holiday certificate you can still let loved ones know it’s coming.” Uh, yeah — on or about February 1st. Happy holidays from the Grinch.
Clearly, retailers like Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble are pinning their hopes for robust holiday sales significantly on digital devices, hoping that their customers will purchase not only the hardware but also an ample electronic library with which to fill it. The question, of course, is where are printed books in all this? Is all this holiday focus on digital reading yet another sign of the impending death of print — by which I mean not only of the technology itself, but also of the broader culture that surrounds it?
Hardly. What we’re bearing witness to, in fact, is the very culture that printed books long ago helped to introduce.
One of my favorite books is Stephen Nissenbaum’s Pulitzer Prize-nominated history, The Battle for Chritsmas(Vintage, 1997), which traces the origins of the modern commercial holiday. It used to be that Christmas was a raucous affair in which members of the lower castes of society were given temporary license to make unusual demands on social and economic elites. Often their requests were for food, drink, or money, and typically these “gifts” were given as a result of the implicit threat of violence. All that started to change in the 19th century, Nissenbaum shows, with the growth of industrial production and the gradual enfranchisement of the working class. Slowly but surely the social- and class-warfare that had defined the Christmas holiday was displaced onto parents and their children. And although the holiday mutated in significant ways and tensions defused, one thing remained pretty much the same: the promise of gifts was held out as compensation for the recipients’ continuing good behavior.
These gifts, however, typically weren’t perishables or cash tips. More likely there were items that had been purchased at stores. And among the first and most popular commercial goods to be given as Christmas presents were, according to Nissenbaum, printed books. Books played a starring role in helping to make Christmas over into the commercial holiday that people know and practice today.
Books may be going high-tech this holiday season, but that doesn’t mean, as some fear, that we’ve abandoned the cultural and economic habits they’ve helped to foster. Our Kindles and Nooks may appear to be pointing toward the digital future, yet if anything they channel the deep structures of our analog past.
I’ve been meaning to weigh in here on Barnes & Noble’s recent announcement about its new e-reader, Nook. It seems to be getting talked about everywhere, including this NPR story that I heard a few days ago. My bottom line is that, while I have not yet tried the device (it won’t be released until the end of November, just in time for the holidays), I am more optimistic about it and its capabilities compared to the Amazon Kindle.
It would be easy enough to point to Nook’s feature-ladenness as the reason behind my optimism. If nothing else it’s got a color screen, which sets it apart from that of Kindle. I’ve described the latter’s inexplicably well-touted e-ink display as reminiscent of an Etch-a-Sketch, although I’m also taken with Nicholson Baker’s description of it in the New Yorker: “[T]he screen was gray. And it wasn’t just gray; it was a greenish, sickly gray. A postmortem gray.” Nook also has touch screen capabilities; Kindle does not. While I’m not a proponent of touch simply for its own sake, I recognize tactility as a key experiential dimension of the handling of printed books. The touch screen thus makes for some nice experiential “carry-over” from the one (analog) reading platform to the other (digital).
But it’s not all about the interface. More important to me are Nook’s sharing functions and its — bear with me on this one — lack of a backup feature. The sharing function is straightforward enough: the device lets your friends borrow your e-titles for up to two weeks. Here’s what the Barnes & Noble website says:
You can share Nook to Nook, but it doesn’t stop there. Using the new Barnes & Noble LendMe™ technology… you will be able to lend to and from any iPhone™, iPod touch, BlackBerry, PC, or Mac, with the free Barnes and Noble eReader software downloaded on it.
Now, what the site neglects to mention is that publishers can opt-out of making their Nook books circulable. Nevertheless, I appreciate that even a limited type of sharing is the default position for the device and its content. Too much DRM does not a happy customer base make.
My delight at the lack of a backup feature clearly requires some explaining. One of the chief selling points of the Amazon Kindle is its so-called “backup” feature. I say “so called” because its not only about user-friendly content protection. The backup occurs on the Amazon server cloud, where intimate details about what, where, how, and for how long you read get archived, presumably forever. That’s great if your Kindle gets stolen or crashes, but it does open up all sorts of privacy concerns that I’ve been addressing lately in lectures at the University of Illinois, the University of Iowa, and tomorrow at Georgetown University.
All that to say, it pleases me that Barnes & Noble isn’t following Amazon into the cloud. Indeed its decision not to go there, it seems to me, is indicative of the company’s sense of its own identity. However much Barnes & Noble may venture into other areas, such as printed book publishing and e-book readers, at the end of the day it still recognizes itself for what it’s always been: a bookseller. Amazon, on the other hand, presents itself as though it were a retailer, but in reality it is, in the words of CEO Jeff Bezos, “a technology company at its core.” (Advertising Age, June 1, 2005). The two company’s respective — indeed, quite divergent — approaches to client e-reader data reflect these differences in their core missions.
I may yet pre-order a Nook to go along with my Kindle. I’m still on the fence, but I’m leaning towards giving it a try. I’ll keep you posted, but until them I’d be interested in hearing how others are weighing in.
